“American tenor Neil Shicoff, who was overlooked for the position of director of Vienna’s State Opera, has pulled out of Austria’s renowned Salzburg Festival.” Shicoff had been tirelessly promoted for the Vienna job by Austrian Chancellor Alfred Gusenbauer, but the heavy-handedness worked against Shicoff, and Dominique Meyer got the gig instead. In a letter to Salzburg’s festival director, Shicoff expressed a desire to distance himself from “intrigues and disappointments.”
Tag: 06.19.07
Saatchi Taps Another Young Artist In A Big Way
“Most contemporary artists dream of having a work bought by Charles Saatchi. James Howard, a student at the Royal Academy Schools, was shocked to discover yesterday that Britain’s most influential collector of contemporary art wanted 46 of his – an entire graduation show.”
Davidson To New York
Newsday‘s Justin Davidson has been named the new classical music critic for New York magazine, which has been taking a lot of heat since firing its longtime classical critic, Peter G. Davis. Davidson won a Pulitzer Prize in 2002, and has previously written for The New Yorker, Slate.com, and Opera News, among other publications.
German Theater To Premiere London Bombing Play
“It is the first play to tackle the 7/7 London bombings. But why is Pornography being staged only in Germany?” The playwright calls it “bewildering,” but says that the nature of the work fit better with a German theatrical sensibility.
Nuns Want Erotic Poems Stifled
“The verses would be no more than the erotic, if masterful, outpourings of a prodigious poet and Nobel laureate were it not for the fact that they appear to talk of his amatory adventures with a series of nuns. But now that a Spanish publishing company has decided it is time to publish the erotic musings of Juan Ramón Jiménez, an outraged order of nuns has asked for his poems to be silenced.”
Documenting An Artistic Disaster
British art critics have not been enjoying their time at this year’s Documenta festival in Kassel, Germany. “Documenta 12 is a disaster. I thought at first it must be me. After all, it is always good to stir things up a bit, to disturb hierarchies, rattle the tyrannical white box, juxtapose the new with the old, the dead with the living, east against west, the brilliant with the talentless, but hang on a second!”
Monet Goes For $37m
“Claude Monet’s masterpiece Nympheas has been sold at auction for £18.5m at Sotheby’s in London. The painting, from Monet’s water lilies series, is part of the auction house’s impressionist and modern art sale.”
YouTube Going Global
Online video giant YouTube has rolled out nine international versions of its popular web site for users in Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain and the UK. “Each site is translated into local languages and has country-specific video rankings and comments… More than half of all viewers on YouTube [are] now from outside the US.”
Grimaud Taken Ill At Disney Hall
A heart arrhythmia caused pianist Hélène Grimaud to cut short a recital in Los Angeles this week. Grimaud had seen a doctor earlier in the day, and withdrew from the stage after becoming dizzy and faltering at the keyboard. Grimaud “wanted to go back on stage, but couldn’t regain enough strength to complete her program.”
Better Get A Taller Podium
Prodigies are nothing new in the music world, but you don’t generally find them on the podium in front of professional orchestras. But this month, a 14-year-old wunderkind from the UK will stand before the orchestra at Moscow’s New Opera Theatre, and conduct the premiere of his own ballet based on Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book.